SSD Prices to Halve With New JMicron Controller

It may be one the great whipping boys for SSD doubters but flash controller manufacturer JMicron claims it has come up with a breakthrough design which could see current prices slashed by up to 50 per cent…

Named the ‘JMF612’, the controller “uses an ARM9 core in a 289-ball TFBGA package, and will support the use of up to 256MB of DDR or DDR2 DRAM as an external cache”. It will also work specifically with new 34nm and 32nm NAND, support Native Command Queuing (NCQ) to easy latency problems and even 128bit AES full disk encryption.

In practical terms, a USB port will be added so SSDs used as drives can easily accept new firmware while data integrity should improve with its ability to “correct up to 24 random bit errors per 1024 bytes”. Finally no less than eight memory channels mean this could support SSDs with capacities in excess of 1TB.

Mass production will begin in July for SATA II based drives with the recently confirmed SATA 3.0 spec not coming into play until 2010.

Whether the new design is enough to restore consumer confidence after the horrendous stuttering issues which plagued the company’s JMF602 controller and even its emergency fix, the JMF602B, is another matter entirely. That said, JMicron can look to Microsoft for inspiration. After all, Windows 7 seems to be doing a pretty good job easing the pain of Vista…